Here I will attempt to place photographs of my ants and their set ups.

Please bear in mind I am just an amateur photographer with a low-mid range camera and macro lens. In the future I plan to upgrade my camera and macro lens to more professional equipment to enable me to take Alex Wild standard photographs. In the meantime here are my humble efforts >_< If anybody seeing this is a professional photographer and you want to give me advice on how to take macro pictures with my equipment, such as suggest ISO settings, focus settings, file settings etc, then please email me via the Contact Myrm page. Thank you.

They are pretty good for their price range and a good steeping stone to the more profressional cameras and lenses.

Advice: When taking photographs of ants with a macro lens, you’re probably better off trying to use manual focus rather than automatic focus, though it’s down to individual preferences in the end. I just find auto-focus a little slow at tomes and it tends to focus on what it wants rather than what you want. I tend to use manual focus and move the whole camera in and out of range.

Above is my Lasius umbratus colony set up. This is my main colony. It consists of two 30 x 20 x 2 cm nesting boxes containing damp peat, one horizontal acrylic nesting box and one small foraging tank. These are connected using clear tubing creating a complete circuit as you can see in the picture. You can click on the picture for a closer look. The white acrylic nesting box is usually covered up but I have just taken the cover off to show it to you. There is a low-level heat mat under the box which is on during the day, but off at night.

This is my Lasius niger 6 colony set up. It’s an 18-month old colony with 1 queen and about 30 workers. They have remained in their test tube despite the fact that they have a horizontal acrylic ant farm attached to the nesting box. I am hoping they expand when the spring/summer of 2017 arrives.

This is my Lasius emarginatus (bhoeschcod) colony set up. It’s simply a small glass box with a lid, containing a stone and a piece of dead wood. The ants are currently living in the wood. I rarely see them at the moment. Consists of 1 queen and about half a dozen workers.